Some thoughts on 'Addiction from a 'neuroscientist'

Readers here will know that I don't think much of 'neuroscience'. Any science is as strong as its weakest component, just as a chain is as strong as its weakest link. This new discipline contains some soft pseudosciences such as 'psychology' and yet has largely supplanted (in the pubic and medical mind) the hard, limited true science of neurology. It also seems to me to have grown up in step with the  new tendency to treat mental illness with pills, rather than through analysis or by long-term confinement in mental hospitals.

 

But I think even less of 'addiction' one of many lazily-accepted concepts in the modern world which are in fact abdications of responsibility for our actions, failures and inactions, dressed up as science ('dyslexia' and 'ADHD', often discussed here, are in the same category).

 

I think in time these ( and other features of modern life) will go the way of 'neurasthenia' and 'brain fever' and other pseudo-medical terms and fancies of the past. So will the 'treatments' given to them, which will become as discredited as lobotomies now are, and as electro-convulsive therapy, and certain drugs discussed here from time to time,  jolly well ought to be.

 

So imagine my mixed feelings when 'The Times' of Monday 25th July publuished extracts from  the neuroscientist Marc Lewis's new book happily entitled: 'The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease'

 

Well, quite, and if it is not a disease, what is it? And why should we accept it as an excuse for our actions?  MediaMogul